Quotes About Ray Kurzweil

I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.

Although the Singularity has many faces, its most important implication is this: our technology will match and then vastly exceed the refinement and suppleness of what we regard as the best of human traits.

If we were building a consciousness detector, Searle would want it to ascertain that it was squirting biological neurotransmitters. American philosopher Daniel Dennett (born in 1942) would be more flexible on substrate, but might want to determine whether or not the system contained a model of itself and of its own performance. That view comes closer to my own, but at its core is still a philosophical assumption.

This effect occurs relatively quickly, unlike the requirement to build up levels in the bloodstream that accompanies some prescription drugs for depression. It is, therefore, an effective, natural, and quick-acting treatment for mild depression. Human trials have also shown benefits for strengthening the liver and for relief from osteoarthritis.

That confirmation will be in the form of a functional simulation of human intelligence that passes the Turing test, which I believe will take place by 2029.119

Artificial "neural nets" are based on Hebb's model of neuronal learning.

We may romanticize the past, but up until fairly recently most of humanity lived extremely fragile lives in which one all-too-common misfortune could spell disaster.

Electronic circuits are millions of times faster than our biological circuits. At first we will have to devote all of this speed increase to compensating for the relative lack of parallelism in our computers, but ultimately the digital neocortex will be much faster than the biological variety and will only continue to increase in speed.

Proponents of strong AI, such as Marvin Minsky, have long thought that consciousness could exist on a silicon platform. Like Ray Kurzweil, he may well be encouraged to download his consciousness to a computer chip no larger than the head of a pin—a perfect fit, as his phrenologist would say.

Aging is not one process. It's many different things going on that cause us to age. I have a program that at least slows down each of these different processes.

Extending our lives, extending our creativity, opening up the mysteries of the brain. All those things that are really exciting - that's kind of the basis of 'Neon Future,' and that's why I interviewed Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey.

My mission at Google is to develop natural language understanding with a team and in collaboration with other researchers at Google.

Science fiction is the great opportunity to speculate on what could happen. It does give me, as a futurist, scenarios.

Ray Kurzweil, dreamed of the Singularity, the moment when human and machine intelligence would merge